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Sunday, February 28, 2016

When BBC Radio 4 producers invited long-time anti-Israel activist Ken Loach to appear on the February 25th edition of ‘The World Tonight’ to talk about a campaign in which he is involved
there can be little doubt that they knew in advance exactly what they
were going to get. It was therefore to be expected that listeners to the
item concerned (from 32:52 here) would hear the tirade of inaccurate statements, crude distortions and downright lies which included the following:

“Israel has
been oppressing the Palestinians for 70 years. They steal their land.
They destroy their houses. They kill them with impunity. They break
international law. They disregard United Nations resolutions and they
break the Geneva conventions. They’re constructing an apartheid state.”

“If you look
in the West Bank, for example, you’ll see settlements that are only
available to Israeli Jews. The Palestinians live in villages at the foot
of those settlements. You’ll see roads that only Israelis can travel
on. The Palestinians, in their own land, cannot travel on those roads.
You’ll see checkpoints that only Palestinians are forced to go through.
Israelis don’t have to go through checkpoints. […] it satisfies the
United Nations definition of apartheid.”

“Will they go
to Gaza and see the rubble? Will they see the schools that were bombed
by Israel in 2014? Will they see the hospitals that were targeted by
Israel? Will they see the places where families were herded together and
then executed? Will they hear about the people who were asked if they
spoke Hebrew and if they spoke Hebrew they were executed?”

And in addition to all that, listeners also heard promotion of the BDS campaign – once again without their being told what that campaign really seeks to bring about.